Otelo Burning's director: From train surfing to wave surfing

Sara Blecher, award winning documentary director and producer returns to London this month for the release of her latest film 'Otelo Burning', which wowed festival audiences at the London Film Festival in 2012.

Sara Blecher is an award winning documentary director and producer known for some noteworthy documentaries for SABC’s award winning current affairs programme Special Assignment.

Sara who lives in Jo’burg, is in London this month for the screening of her latest film Otelo Burning. I had the privilege of chatting to her about Otelo Burning and the unique process this film took to get from script to screen.

You did a film called Surfing Soweto. So, you’ve gone from train surfing to wave surfing?
It definitely felt for a number of years that all the work I was doing was about surfing. The train surfing documentary took a while to make because we followed the lives of three train surfers over the course of four years. Otelo Burning was also an ongoing project that took about eight years. The screenplay came out of a workshop process we held in the township of Lamontville where the film is set. It was a long process with a lot of people involved.

Where does Otelo’s story come from?
The story is loosely based on real events. I went back to Durban after many years in Jo’burg and found startling changes on the Durban beachfront over the course of the end of apartheid. One day the Durban beachfront was completely white, and the next day it was completely black. People swimming in the water, girls hanging around the lifeguards; it was exactly the same scene only the colour of the people had changed. I struck up a conversation with one of the lifeguards and he told me about a pool in Lamontville where he and all the lifeguards had learned to swim. He took me there and began telling me stories about the township and the movie was born. The film is loosely based on these young black boys who came out of that swimming pool, an extraordinary group of young men, one of whom became a water polo player in England. Sihle Xaba, who plays Mandla, went on to become a competitive body boarder. We combined these stories and took some liberties to create Otelo Burning. The story of the tragic necklacing is a true story.

Would the Gunston 500 have allowed black surfers to enter the competition during apartheid?
We researched this quite thoroughly and found that there were a group of surfers running the competitions in South Africa at the time who were really forward thinking. They realised apartheid was going to end and that if South Africans wanted to compete internationally, they needed to at least appear to be multiracial. They actually identified black surfers and trained them to compete. Sihle Xaba is a pretty well known South African body-boarder and lifeguard. The other actors couldn’t surf, but one of them learnt enough to stand up during shooting.

Is the legend of the snake in the water an actual African tale?
Things like that came out of the workshop. The local people told stories about growing up and what their parents said about the sea. We would devise and act out a scene about that story… that’s essentially how the script developed.

What made you choose to do the film in Zulu?
Nothing else made any sense to me. It felt inauthentic to do the film in English. Much of the Zulu isn’t literally translated in the subtitles, but if you do speak the language, the script is so rich. For example, there is the word ‘mlungu’ meaning ‘white people’, but there are three other words used for white people in the film. One of them translates as ‘people who make things always very complicated’. It’s brilliant, but you can’t print that because then the movie needs to be read. We tried to bring across the richness of the language as much as possible.

Is surfing something that the locals can identify with?
Even in the movie it’s only a small group of guys who go out and surf. But what is interesting is that since it has been released, the number of black surfers, particularly on the Durban beachfront, has dramatically increased.

Many films have been set against the backdrop of apartheid in South Africa. How does Otelo Burning bring something fresh to that narrative?
For

me the film isn’t about apartheid, but about freedom. Freedom unites. When you are struggling for freedom everybody is together in that struggle. It’s when you get freedom that things like jealously and greed start entering the picture. That destroys freedom. So it’s not about the heroes or the struggle, it’s about what happens when freedom is attained. In that way it’s very different from apartheid films. The backdrop of this film is the end of apartheid. It was an interesting political time because everything was coloured by this coming freedom, which is why we include Mandela’s release in the film.

Did you consider alternate endings?
There is always talk of alternate endings because there’s always pressure for a happy ending. At the beginning of the film you think you’re watching a little surf movie, then suddenly it draws you in and whacks you a couple of times. In some ways the ending is quite hopeful.

How has Otelo Burning been received abroad?
It has done extremely well all over the world and won many awards, which was very surprising for me. My intention was to make a film for a Lamontville audience. It has had extraordinarily popular run on TV in South Africa, perhaps because TV is a more accessible medium than cinema for the rural people.

What’s your next project?
It’s a coming of age story about young girls. It’s a Jo’burg story, set in Yeoville, which is kind of a melting pot of Africa … and there’s no surfing!

Otelo Burning will be showing at various London cinemas from 16-21 April 2013.